Yes, I think that would work well if I was checking to see if two equations were identical. In my case, however, I have a single equation, which I have solved using Maple. I want to verify that the solution is correct by plugging it back into the original equation. When I do that I get a mess that I can't seem to simplify. It could be that the solution is incorrect, but I'm pretty confident that it should be correct, and I need only to prove it.